I'd like to note here that we have been conditioned to see writers in this certain way because of how they write about themselves. What if everyone could write the way a gifted writer does about themselves and their passions or professions? I bet there would be a lot more pretension about other professions and probably a similar blow-up of self-importance.

I'm not sure you have to be a monster to write, but I do know you have to tap into parts of you that normally are kept under a tight lid. It's making sure that lid is replaced securely that's the trick.

Tóibín sees his book as “a pure act of empathy. Trying to imagine what it would have been like for Mary, and in doing that I found myself in a difficult space I didn’t want to go into again, ever. Even reading it over was disturbing.”

I imagine Supreme chief Roberts in that "space" right now... and I'm comforted as it were by my imagination.

I once attended a midwestern university's famous writer's program. The students fell into three camps; those that posed, those that studied to be writers and those that wrote. The last were driven to write and many went on to publish novels and books of poems that you would be familiar with. Those in the middle, in which group I counted myself, went on to teach and, some, to publish books you would not have read or heard of. The first group mostly vanished except for one or two who wrote in fountain pens in notebooks and went on to be semi-famous. All were better writers than I.

His latest novel, which is novella length, is called The Testament of Mary. That’s Mary as in the Virgin Mary. In old age she is giving her version of the life of Christ. Having spent a lifetime listening to everyone else’s versions, she is angry. “They appear more often now,” she reflects at one point, referring to two of Jesus’s disciples. “Both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world. There is something hungry and rough in them. A brutality boiling in their blood.”It may seem like sacrilege to some, but Christians are more tolerant than Muslims when it comes to having their sacred figures fictionalised, I say. Indeed, I bet Salman Rushdie wishes he had written about Mary rather than Mohammed.“Yes, I wonder if that is more true in Europe than America, though,” Tóibín says. “Here we have a history of putting words into Mary’s mouth. George Moore and DH Lawrence did it. Monty Python did it! The issue with Salman was people believed what his characters were saying was what he thought, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a novel works, how a writer works. Most of the protesters hadn’t even read the book.”

Oh, please. I realize he's saying "more," but that's like saying it's more true of Singapore than of the Maldives that it is not covered with snow.

The students fell into three camps; those that posed, those that studied to be writers and those that wrote.

There's a frantic quality to group three that I wish I could capture and use. I love doing the research and outlining. When the impulse grabs to crank out 5000 words, it usually lasts a day or so and it's awesome. Those third groupers, though, they are like that every single day.

ScottM: The writers, the last category, lived to write. They worked weird odd jobs to pay for the time they needed to write. They rarely drank with the first two crowds, they were as intent on writing as a first year investment banker is on making it. And they worked like investment bankers. They fucking hustled looking back on it.

I'm a terrible monster, at least according to my ex, but it doens't seem to help my writing. Indeed, I protect my ex's identity. (Her name, address and phone number are available for a small fee, however.)

True. And yet all writers write out of themselves. Where else would they have to draw on in order to get behind the fronts others put up?

Not all writers are monsters. There are some writers who are temperamentally "square" and feel no compulsion to be transgressive. I am thinking of Wallace Stegner, one of the greatest American writers, much of whose work is dark but not epater le bourgeois, because he was essentially bourgeois.

For those who've never read him I would recommend: Crossing To Safety; The Spectator Bird; All The Little Live Things.

When has one's "morality" ever been useful in a courtroom? A lawyer uses existing laws to defend his client, whether he believes his client is guilty or not is irrelevant. (I learned that from TV shows.) So where does morality come in in a courtroom?